Todd, Tim and Kellan Cook love Baseball, the Seattle Mariners and trekking around the country to visit stadiums and watch games. These are their stories. #FatherSonBaseball

Cinco de Mayo with the Mariners

Cinco de Mayo marked the fifth and final game of our Seattle trip. We had great tickets 14 rows behind the visitors’ dugout. It was a 1:40 p.m. start time and Tim fell alseep on the drive down to Safeco Field. He remained in a quasi-sleep as I carried him into the stadium. Here we are at the end of our row of seats:

We got around and did a lot wihle Tim was still alseep…or close to asleep:

We also stood around and watched players warm up at both dugouts. Here is a picture with my mom and Tim:

And here are a couple more pictures by the dugout:

In the top left, its a Mariners rookie pitcher wearing his pink Hello Kitty back pack. I’m not sure which pitcher that is. In the top right, you can see us standing above the M’s dugout. We saw Jason Vargas down in there. I said, “Hey, Vargas.” He nodded to me. As he walked under where he was no longer visible from the stands, I followed up, “Nice win the other night.” Vargas peeked his head back out and looked up to me and very earnestly said, “Thank you.” It was his first win in a long time due to injuries, so he was very happy to get it under his belt.

In the bottom left, I’m showing off a sleepy Tim and a ball we just got from Ian Kinsler. He was playing catch in front of the visitors’ dugout before the game. When he was finished, I yelled, “Hey, Ian” and I flashed my glove at him. He looked up and toss me the ball from 30-40 feet away with enough accuracy that I was able to catch it despite holding a sleeping 35 pounder in my arms.

At the bottom right, you can see that Tim finally started waking up and decided to check out the stadium with Grandpa’s binoculars.

As the Mariners took the field, the roof was closed:

But two seconds later, the roof began to open and the sun streamed in:

This was our view from our seats:

I noticed this little wind contraption on top of the Safeco Field roof:

With the sun shining bright, Tim decided to make some funny faces:

So we took some action shots of the Mariners:

At the top left, Russell Branyan (for some reason) is showing bunt with no one on base.

At top right, Ichiro is taking a pitch. Unfortunately, this was Tim’s first Mariners game in which Ichiro did not get a hit.

At bottom left, Erik Bedard is delivering a strike.

At bottom right, the Moose is hyping up the crowd.

For the first time on the trip, we saw the peanut man and got him to chuck us a bag of hot peanuts:

The peanut man is a Safeco Field All-Star. No one is better at selling and delivering peanuts than the peanut man. If Dave Neihaus can make the Mariners Hall of Fame, I truly believe Rick “Peanut Man” Kaminiski deserves to be enshrined as well. He has been making Mariners home games more fun since the beginning. Click here to see a short clip of the peanut man in action.

I also took some shots of the Rangers:

At top left, Omar Vizquel hanging out in the dugout. He didn’t play in either game of this two game series.

At top right, Ian Kinsler (fresh off of giving us his warm up ball) takes strike one on the first pitch of the game.

At bottom left, Michael Young fouls a ball into the Mariners dugout.

At bottom right, Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s last name makes a half circle around his number on the back of his jersey.

Next, I headed out to the outfield where my friend, Steve Escandon, and his boy, Diego, were sitting with Steve’s school. Steve is a teacher and his class was on the best field trip ever. I couldn’t find Steve right away, so I took a picture of the Safeco Field roof where it rests over the train tracks while it is in the “open” position:

A few second later, the rain started to fall and the roof closed. Here is a shot of it almost closed:

Eventually, I found Steve and Diego walking through the Left-CF concourse. They were dressed like it was the dead of winter while I was wearing shorts. We headed over to our seats so Steve could say hi to my folks and Diego could say hi to Tim. On our way over to the seats, we stopped in to see the bullpen pub:

Here is the view from the counter at the left of the picture above. It looks out to the field just below the hand operated scoreboard:

Finally, we made it to our seats and Tim did some close talking with Diego:

The game was another good one until the top of the 10th with two outs. The Mariners managed 1 run on 1 hit through nine innings. Vincente Padilla pitched lights out. Erik Bedard pitched well too and also gave up only one run.

In the top of the 10th inning, Shawn Kelly got hurt mid-pitch and the M’s brought in Denny Stark. My Dad commented that relieves never take enough time warming up when they come in after an injury to the previous pitcher. Well, Stark got the first two outs on long fly balls to Ichiro. But then he proved my Dad right. He gave up a barrage of consecutive hits including a grand slam by Saltalamacchia. The Mariners ended up losing 7-2 in 10 innings.

Again, Griff didn’t play due to his illness. While the trip was great fun and a smashing success in most respects, we failed in our quest to see Griff hit a home run as a Mariner. We’ll have to wait until the Mariners come to Baltimore in June.

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